My father believed in the value of practice — that a thing could be understood, mastered, seen, with sufficient study and repetition. In his workshop he made sketches in pencil and crayon, and sometimes puzzled out a complex form in pieces of scrap lumber before setting chisel to wood.

The Möbius band, with its exquisite simplicity, appealed to his aesthetic sensibilities and his engineer’s precision. It was a form he contemplated and returned to for years, practicing its infinite curve in paper, rubber, metal, plastic and wood.

The sculpture eventually emerged from the sketches: a small stack of Finnish birch plywood, given to him by a friend, was glued and clamped into a solid block, then carved and filed and sanded and sanded and sanded to a glossy twist of magic. In his sketchbook, the finished piece is recorded in his neat engineer’s handwriting with a date (1986) and number (451) and a pencil sketch with an erasure that shows he was still mastering the geometry of the thing.

As I write, my tapping fingers twist another scrap of fabric into a Möbius of words, practicing, trying to understand, looking for the form, the beauty, the truth hidden within memory and mind.

In the top image, the sculpture in progress is shown third down in the middle row. The finished piece is 8.5″ x 12″.